How Chrissy Metz Is Changing Women's Lives

On September 20, 2016, the day NBC's This Is Us premiered, actor Sterling K. Brown walked up to costar Chrissy Metz and whispered, "'All right, are you ready?,'" Brown recalls. "She said, 'Ready for what?' I said, 'Ready to be a star!' " Metz's response: "She cracked up." But Brown wasn't joking. "At that point, I had seen the work that everybody else had yet to see."

Within months, Metz, 36, was a Golden Globe nominee being accosted in California Chicken Cafe by tearful women thanking her for her vulnerability and courage, confessing that This Is Us had "changed their lives." There was her smiling face on the cover of People, with the line "I'm Proud of Who I Am." Here she was on a SiriusXM radio show, slamming online trolls for body-shaming Lady Gaga post–Super Bowl: "I want to see somebody else get on that damn stage and do what she did!"

Vivian Zink/NBC; Ron Batzdorff/NBC

American audiences have seen plus-size women on reality shows, weight-loss competitions, even the odd sitcom. But as Kate Pearson on This Is Us, Metz is the first to star in a major network drama that treats obesity, identity, and self-esteem as a central story line. The show has been praised for equipping Kate not just with a struggle, but with an actual life: She flails in search of a career but also has a hilarious, hot-for-her fiancé, Toby (Chris Sullivan), and gets propositioned for sex by another man. Metz herself has been happily dating This Is Us cameraman Josh Stancil, 40, for several months. Sitting in an unassuming Studio City coffee shop wearing a long gray jersey top, black jeans, black Christian Siriano flats, and bubblegum-pink lipstick, she notes that dating has never been a problem. "I know a lot of women, especially if they have insecurities, they take whatever is thrown at them," Metz says, with a perfectly timed eye roll. "I'm like, girl—please."

Metz appears unusually at ease carrying the mantle of instant role model, one that many actors take decades to master, or never do.

This dual punch—the actress's intimate, relatable onscreen plight, plus her real-life buoyancy and life-of-the-party charisma—seems flush with a potential that could transcend even almighty TV ratings. Will Chrissy Metz be a force for cultural progress and acceptance, even empathy and kindness—a poster girl along the lines of what '90s-era Ellen DeGeneres became for lesbians: a lovable, known entity, a friend, whose point of difference is eventually accepted as just one of her many facets? (Metz's body, after all, is a point of difference only in the world of media; in the world of actual Americans, the average woman is size 16 to 18, and 67 percent of women wear a size 14 or larger—making plus-size people the most underrepresented majority on TV.) Okay, that's a lot to hang on a woman nine months into her first mega-role. But it's not totally out of the question, either. Metz appears unusually at ease carrying the mantle of instant role model, one that many actors take decades to master, or never do.

TV wizard Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story, The People v. O.J. Simpson) spotted a particular strength in Metz that inspired him to put her on the map in 2014. He wanted Ima "Barbara" Wiggles, a Park Avenue debutante recruited from a wellness facility to become the literal fat lady in FX's American Horror Story: Freak Show, to have "all different types of appetites," he says. "Somebody who, even back in the '50s, thin or fat, would admit to loving sex and physicality." In Metz's audition tape, he recognized "a strong woman who doesn't take shit from anybody, who struggles with cruelty, of course, but takes a stance of 'I'm not going to be a victim of anybody or anything. I'm going to push through to be optimistic and hopeful.'" Murphy continues: "Like all pioneering people, her spirit is bigger than her circumstances—that's what lifts people up."

This Is Us is a feat not just of casting but of construction, weaving flashbacks with current-day scenes to chronicle the Pearson family: sexy-earnest parents Jack and Rebecca (the magnetic Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore) and their three kids—Metz's Kate and her biological twin, Kevin (Justin Hartley), all of whom are white, and their adopted black "triplet," Randall, played by Brown. Each Pearson sibling is loved and privileged—the show has the comfortable Pottery Barn catalog–veneer of wealth familiar from network-TV predecessors such as Parenthood—and yet each is in some way stuck: Type A overachiever Randall longs for a connection to his African American roots and birth parents; blond, brawny actor Kevin is a sitcom beefcake desperate to be taken seriously; and witty, vivacious Kate, for reasons that unfold gradually over season one, has been locked in a battle with her body since childhood. The show is unapologetically melodramatic, and yet it has proven irresistible for even the most hard-nosed critics. Watching This Is Us is "like getting beaten up with a pillow soaked in tears," wrote the New York Times. After one episode, queen of snark Sarah Silverman tweeted, "I'm a puddle of tears."

Metz and her onscreen mom, Mandy Moore, at ELLE's Women in TV dinner in January.

Getty Images

In January, NBC re-upped the cast's contracts—not for one season, but two. It was a savvy way to lock down the freshly minted stars of fall's top-rated new network show, not to mention one that had garnered NBC its first Golden Globe nod for best TV drama in a decade (plus Best Supporting Actress nominations for Metz and Moore). But the network's chief exec also noted that this rare move was partly an insurance policy for the show's emotionally invested viewers: The characters you love aren't going anywhere.

If there were any doubts about how directly NBC would address Kate's weight, those were dispelled four minutes into the pilot. Some 15.3 million viewers have watched Metz disrobe down to her underwear, hesitate, then remove the last few ounces of added weight—her earrings—and step onto a scale. The network "does testing when you finish a pilot," says This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman. "Needless to say, Kate's metrics were off the charts. People immediately responded to the character and to Chrissy, which really came as no surprise to anyone."

Kate's ordeal—the exhaustive calorie counting and demoralizing weigh-ins familiar to any long-term dieter—quickly stood out as one of the show's most compelling story lines but also its most critiqued, by viewers who found Kate worryingly one-dimensional. "I think it's a little silly," Fogelman says. "It's like saying, Why is Randall's story so often about his biological father, or Kevin's about his acting career? These are the crossroad stories we introduced them with. Of course, they get a lot of screen time."

The parallels Metz sees with Kate "are so crazy," she says. "I feel like it's forcing me to look at these issues every day. Every time I pick up the script, every time I go to the refrigerator, as Chrissy, as Kate, as Chrissy, as Kate…I feel as if I am two people sometimes." When Metz first learned about the role, she called her mother, Denise Hodge. "'Mom, this role is meant for me,'" Hodge remembers her daughter saying. "'Kate is the person that I was.'" Metz meant that Kate is just coming to the realization that weight itself is not the root of her problems, but a symptom—a truth hard-won by the actress herself.

After her thirtieth birthday, "I had a big meltdown," Metz says. She'd moved to L.A. at age 23 after being singled out by a talent scout at the Holiday Inn in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida. But in Hollywood, "I can count on my hands how many auditions I had in three years." She landed a Bell South commercial and guest spots on My Name Is Earl and Entourage, but mostly she worked as an agent, booking kids for commercials. She'd struggled with her shape since childhood, enrolling in Weight Watchers as young as 11, but it was during this period, she says, that her weight spiraled upward. "You're sitting at a desk," she says. "Your life is literally two clients; they bring you Sprinkles cupcakes."

The process that followed Metz's moment of reckoning not only gave her the footing to radically change her circumstances but also the fortitude to eventually access (and expose) many of her own vulnerabilities through Kate. Over time, she tried several therapists, read a lot (including the work of self-help guru Marianne Williamson), and spent time digging into deep "spiritual work." Yes, her sense of humor applies even to that phrase. "People are like, 'Oh, you moved to L.A. and you got so kooky!' But whatever! Everybody's on their own path."

"There aren't a lot of roles on TV that people all over the world can relate to," Ryan Murphy says.

On This Is Us, Kate considers bariatric surgery but decides against it—a conclusion that Metz, too, arrived at. "People don't fill a void to this extent without some underlying issues," she says. "The quick fixes, the fad diets, the surgeries—they don't assess the emotional stuff, the trauma you've got to get over. The truth is, we've all got issues—mine just happen to be external."

Metz has been candid about long-simmering childhood pain resulting from her parents' divorce and its aftermath, during which Hodge—whom Metz describes as "as gritty as they come"—found herself a single mother of three struggling to pay the bills. She baked and sold cakes for a while, drove a cab, and ultimately got a job in the contracts department of the University of Florida, where she worked her way up. Metz says that in those years, "every penny went somewhere."

In another almost uncomfortably close parallel with her character—who at the end of season one hinted that the source of her pain was guilt and grief over her father's death—Metz's own father looms large in her psyche. Growing up, "I had a lot of resentment. How does a person leave?" Peripheral at best during her childhood, he recently came back into the picture, a turn of events that has the added, surreal twist of her newfound fame. Speaking to him now "is like talking to a stranger. I don't know him." But her father's own weight struggle, and the fact of his quadruple bypass at age 55, is a sobering connection for Metz, who acknowledges that what she's contending with "is obviously hereditary, but it's also issues, dare I say addictions, in my family."

Metz as Kate in

NBC

Given the similarities between Metz and her character, it's tempting to conflate the two—which no doubt adds fuel to audiences' fiercely protective fondness for Kate. "But that would be a mistake," Fogelman says. "It actually, accidentally, does a slight disservice to what Chrissy's doing as an actress playing the character." For Fogelman, there's no comparison: "Kate's a late bloomer, shy, not one to hold the spotlight comfortably. Clearly marked by tragedy, there is a sadness to her. Chrissy is filled with light. She's funny, warm, charismatic. She's very popular with our cast and crew. She is not a wallflower. She was a star from day one."

There it is again: that s word. Metz may find the idea hilarious, but her veteran colleagues marvel at a born star. "There's the craft of acting, and there's the personality that is just God-given," Brown says. "Someone who just lights up whatever space they walk into. That is Chrissy Metz."

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